We haven’t heard as much about it as you might think, given that Canada and the U.S. are playing on Saturday in Toronto for a berth, but the Rugby World Cup will be in England and Wales in two years time. And it promises to be a massive show. Sure, the Super Bowl is big. Ditto for the Stanley Cup and the Pan Am Games, which will be in Toronto in 2015 in case you forgot and will have more athletes than a Winter Olympics. But the Rugby World Cup is said to have the third largest global audience of Read more
The entry of the big boys from Trump and Shangri-La and the new Four Seasons Hotel and the fairly new Ritz Carlton has garnered a lot of attention in Toronto hotel circles. So much so that we (meaning in this case, I), sometimes forget about a very sleek and very convenient hotel right downtown: One King West. The famous tower in the historic (almost 100 years!) bank building at King and Yonge has 330 hotel rooms; all suites with kitchens for the convenience of guests. They do a fair bit of leisure travel, as it’s very convenient to attractions like Read more
This is from a visit to the great city of Montreal a couple years ago… MONTREAL – I’d forgotten how much fun this town really is. I’d been a few times with my kids over the years, but last week’s brief sojourn was my first time to spend a few hours really looking around. I like the old city just fine, but I’d seen it before a number of times. I’ve also spent a bit of time on Crescent Street, attending a Jacques Villeneuve event at his Newtown restaurant when I worked in the sports department. So this time I Read more
This is from a trip I took to London in the winter of 2009, partly to show how cheap it can be in the off-season… LONDON – Last time I was here it was summer and, oh, about 35 degrees Celsius. Today, when my Air Canada flight touched down after some really heavy turbulence (think monster drops that had even the flight attendants gasping for air) it was 2 degrees. With several inches of snow on the ground. I’m normally not one to go for the cold, but this town is far, far better in the snow than in the Read more
ZURICH – This is a town that doesn’t get enough respect. Yeah, there are banks and old hotels and stodgy folks. Same in New York and Toronto. There’s also a wild part of town, West Zurich, where they’ve taken old industrial buildings and turned them into cool nightclubs. You’ll find scantily dressed ladies parading about various parts of town trying to drum up business. On my last visit, I saw a black van that represented a clothing company and had the words “Enjoy your fucking shirt” scrawled across the back. Maybe 10 years ago, I was in town for the Read more
This is from a golf trip I took with some friends to the golfing mecca of America a couple years ago… PEBBLE BEACH, CALIFORNIA — My buddies and I had been back home for a week or so when I got an email from one of them talking about our early September trip to famed Pebble Beach. “Thanks for the trip to paradise,” he said. I couldn’t say it any better myself. I’m not one for getting nervous talking to athletes or celebrities or politicians, but I had a serious case of the knee-knocks on the first few holes at Read more
Here are a couple of blog posts from British Columbia… VANCOUVER – Downtown Vancouver’s Art Gallery is a great spot, with a big patio out front and big steps and a feel, to me, anyway, of a public square in London. The best part? Food trucks. Food trucks all over the damned place. It’s not bad enough we don’t have a public square in Toronto as nice as the one in front of the Art Gallery of Vancouver (not in my mind, anyway). No, they have to lord it over us with trucks selling the most wonderful of foods; a Read more
